Sunday 25 March 2012

"If there's a narrative, I want it in the flesh."

For my new project I have been researching female artists who use the female form in their work. After purchasing Phaidon's brilliant new book The Artist's Body, I became fascinated with the work of Jenny Saville, especially her collaboration with photographer Glen Luchford of which some images are shown below. This work really caught my eye as it captures the female nude in the way I am looking into, unromanticized and raw unlike how I believe a lot of male photographers always document it. Saville's body is not perfect in the way the media represents women and the photographs are deliciously fleshy.

Saville lays on top of a large sheet of perspex as Glen Luchford, a fashion photographer, photographs from below. The resulting images present a female nude distorted by pressing heavily on the perspex but is also beautiful due to the use of light and the opulent slickness of photography. Both seductive and disturbing, Saville's form is being pushed out of the 'canvas' towards the viewer rather than remaining safely at a distance, a theme I am working with within my self portraits for my final project, showing raw, unperfect flesh right up in the viewer's face. The huge scale of Saville's photographs, together with the cropping of her body, which almost completely fills the frame, contribute to the overwhelming sense of flesh and are a huge inspiration for my, more subtle, but fleshy self portraits.

Tuesday 6 March 2012

Start of Major Project

After many months of not taking photos and writing my 8000 word essay it's been tough trying to turn my mind back to working on a project. Looking back at my last Major Project Planning I have been finding it difficult to develop my self portraits, dealing with the issues of being insignificant and dealing with this faze of my life, moving on from the safety of education and into the big bad working world.

After researching into the artist Jemima Stehli, dealing with issues of the gaze and using her body in many of her portraits she has become a huge influence to me. With this in mind I wanted to deal with some of the issues I have with my body. After putting on a lot of weight over the winter term I started a health kick in January and have lost a few pounds and with this I have gained a new self confidence in my body. Whilst I don't have a perfect body, and never in my mind will, I want to try and celebrate my body and get over these fears. Therefore I picked up the camera and started to do some nude shots, I wanted to focus on womanly curves and aspects of the figure regularly used to document the sensuality of the female form but making the images fairly abstract, so only hints of it are captured.

Below are my first experiments with this idea. I am very nervous and even embarrassed to bare all to you but thanks to such female artists as Jemima Stehli and Mari Sarai I want to celebrate these nerves and embrace them. I don't know where these images will lead to but for now am fairly pleased with them, celebrating wobbly bits in all their glory! Let me know what you think.